Table operations

• A partitioned table can have a maximum of six levels of partitions.
• By default, a table can have a maximum of 60,000 partitions. You can adjust the maximum number of partitions in a table based on your project configurations.

-- Create a table.
create table [if not exists] <table_name>
 [(<col_name> <data_type> [comment <col_comment>], ...)]
 [comment <table_comment>]
 [partitioned by (<col_name> <data_type> [comment <col_comment>], ...)]
 [lifecycle <days>];
-- Create a table based on an existing table.
 create table [if not exists] <table_name> [as <select_statement> | like <existing_table_name>];

• if not exists: optional. If a table that has the same name as the table you want to create exists and you do not specify the if not exists option, an error is returned. If you specify the if not exists option when you create a table, a success message is returned regardless of whether a table with the same name exists, even if the schema of this table is different from that of the table you want to create. If the table you want to create has the same name as an existing table, the table is not created and the metadata of the existing table is not changed.
• table_name: required. The name of a table. The name must be 1 to 128 bytes in length, and can contain letters, digits, and underscores (_). It must start with a letter and cannot contain special characters. It is not case-sensitive. If the value of this parameter does not meet the requirements, an error is returned.
• col_name: optional. The name of a table column. The name must be 1 to 128 bytes in length, and can contain letters, digits, and underscores (_). It must start with a letter and cannot contain special characters. It is not case-sensitive. If the value of this parameter does not meet the requirements, an error is returned.
• col_comment: optional. The comment of a column. The comment must be a valid string that is a maximum of 1,024 bytes in length. If the value of this parameter does not meet the requirements, an error is returned.
• table_comment: optional. The comment of a table. The comment must be a valid string that is a maximum of 1,024 bytes in length. If the value of this parameter does not meet the requirements, an error is returned.
• data_type: optional. The data type of a column. The following data types are supported: BIGINT, DOUBLE, BOOLEAN, DATETIME, DECIMAL, and STRING. For more information, see Date types.
• partitioned by (<col_name> <data_type> [comment <col_comment>], ...: optional. The partition field of a partitioned table.
  • col_name: the name of a partition key column. The name must be 1 to 128 bytes in length, and can contain letters, digits, and underscores (_). It must start with a letter and cannot contain special characters. It is not case-sensitive. If the value of this parameter does not meet the requirements, an error is returned.
  • data_type: the data type of a partition key column. The following data types are supported: BIGINT, DOUBLE, BOOLEAN, DATETIME, DECIMAL, and STRING. In MaxCompute V1.0, partition key columns must be of the STRING type. In MaxCompute V2.0, partition key columns can be of the TINYINT, SMALLINT, INT, BIGINT, VARCHAR, or STRING types. For more information, see Date types. If you use a partition field to partition a table, a full table scan is not required when you add partitions, update partition data, or read partition data. This improves the efficiency of data processing.
  • col_comment: the comment of a partition key column. The comment must be a valid string that is a maximum of 1,024 bytes in length. If the value of this parameter does not meet the requirements, an error is returned.
  Note The value of a partition key column cannot contain double-byte characters. It must start with a letter and can contain letters, digits, and some supported special characters. It can be a maximum of 128 bytes in length. Supported special characters are spaces, colons (:), underscores (_), dollar signs ($), number signs (#), periods (.), exclamation points (!), and at signs (@). The behavior of other characters is not defined, such as escape characters \t, \n, and /.
• lifecycle: optional. The lifecycle of a table. The value must be a positive integer. Unit: days.
  • Non-partitioned tables: If data in a non-partitioned table remains unchanged for the number of days specified by days after the last data modification, MaxCompute executes a statement such as DROP TABLE to reclaim the table.
  • Partitioned tables: MaxCompute determines whether to reclaim a partition based on the value of LastDataModifiedTime. Unlike non-partitioned tables, a partitioned table is not deleted even if all of its partitions are reclaimed. You can configure lifecycles for tables, but not for partitions.
• create table [if not exists] <table_name> [as <select_statement> | like <existing_table_name>]:
  • If you execute the CREATE TABLE…AS select_statement… statement to create a table with data replicated from another table, the replicated information does not include partition attributes. The reason is that partition key columns in the source table are considered common columns in the created table.
  • If you execute the CREATE TABLE…LIKE existing_table_name statement to create a table, the destination table may have the same schema as the source table. However, the destination table does not replicate data or lifecycle settings from the source table.

• Example 1: Create a non-partitioned table named test1.

  create table test1 (key STRING);

• Example 2: Create a partitioned table named sale_detail.

  create table if not exists sale_detail(
   shop_name     STRING,
   customer_id   STRING,
   total_price   DOUBLE)
  partitioned by (sale_date STRING, region STRING); 

• Example 3: Create a table named test3 with a lifecycle.

  create table test3 (key BOOLEAN) partitioned by (pt STRING, ds STRING) lifecycle 100;

• Example 4: Create a table named test4 based on the test3 table. Make sure that all properties (such as field type and partition type) of the test4 table except its lifecycle are the same as those of the test3 table.

  create table test4 like test3;

• Example 5: Create the test5 table based on the test3 table and copy the data of the test3 table, except its lifecycle, to the test5 table.

  create table test5 AS select * from test3;

alter table <table_name> changeowner to <new_owner>;

• table_name: required. The name of the table whose owner you want to change.
• new_owner: required. The new owner of the table.

-- Change the owner of the test1 table to ALIYUN$xxx@aliyun.com.
alter table test1 changeowner to 'ALIYUN$xxx@aliyun.com';

drop table [if exists] <table_name>; 

• if exists: optional. If you do not specify the if exists option and the specified table does not exist, an error is returned. If you specify the if exists option, a success message is returned regardless of whether the specified table exists.
• table_name: required. The name of the table that you want to delete.

-- Delete the sale_detail table. A success message is returned regardless of whether the sale_detail table exists.
drop table if exists sale_detail; 

-- View the information of a table or view.
desc <table_name|view_name>; 
-- View the information of an external table.
desc extended <table_name>; 

• table_name: required. The name of the table that you want to view.
• view_name: required. The name of the view that you want to view.
• extended: the external table. This parameter is required if the table you want to view is an external table.

• Example 1: Query the information of the partitioned table sale_detail.

  desc sale_detail;               

  Returned results:

  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Owner: ALIYUN$****@aliyun.com | Project: test_project                              |
  | TableComment:                                                                      |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | CreateTime:               2014-01-01 17:32:13                                      |
  | LastDDLTime:              2014-01-01 17:57:38                                      |
  | LastModifiedTime:         1970-01-01 08:00:00                                      |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | InternalTable: YES      | Size: 0                                                  |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Native Columns:                                                                    |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Field           | Type       | Comment                                             |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | shop_name       | string     |                                                     |
  | customer_id     | string     |                                                     |
  | total_price     | double     |                                                     |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Partition Columns:                                                                 |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | sale_date       | string     |                                                     |
  | region          | string     |                                                     |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

• Example 2: Query the information of the view sale_detail_view.

  desc sale_detail_view;

  Returned results:

  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Owner: ALIYUN$****@aliyun.com | Project: test_project                              |
  | TableComment: a view for table sale_detail                                         |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | CreateTime:               2020-11-19 16:18:35                                      |
  | LastDDLTime:              2020-11-19 17:27:22                                      |
  | LastModifiedTime:         2020-11-19 16:18:35                                      |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | VirtualView  : YES  | ViewText: select shop_name, customer_id, total_price from sale_detail |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Native Columns:                                                                    |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Field           | Type       | Label | Comment                                     |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  | store_name      | string     |       |                                             |
  | customer_id     | string     |       |                                             |
  | price           | double     |       |                                             |
  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  
  OK

desc <table_name> partition (<pt_spec>);

• table_name: required. The name of the partitioned table whose partition information you want to query.
• pt_spec: required. The information of the partition that you want to query. The value of this parameter is in the partition_col1=col1_value1, partition_col2=col2_value1... format. For a table with multi-level partitions, you must specify all values of the partition key columns.

-- Query information of the partitioned table sale_detail.
desc sale_detail partition (sale_date='201310',region='beijing');

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| PartitionSize: 2109112                                                             |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| CreateTime:               2015-10-10 08:48:48                                      |
| LastDDLTime:              2015-10-10 08:48:48                                      |
| LastModifiedTime:         2015-10-11 01:33:35                                      |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
OK

-- List all tables and views in a project.
show tables;
-- List the tables or views whose names contain the chart keyword in a project.
show tables like '<chart>';

-- List the tables whose names contain the sale* keyword in a project. The asterisk (*) indicates any fields.
show tables like 'sale*';              

ALIYUN$account_name:sale_detail
......
-- ALIYUN is a system prompt. It indicates that the table was created by an Alibaba Cloud account. If you are a Resource Access Management (RAM) user of an Alibaba Cloud account, the system prompt is RAM.

show partitions <table_name>; 

table_name: required. The name of the partitioned table whose partition information you want to query.

-- List all partitions of the sale_detail table.
show partitions sale_detail;

sale_date=201310/region=beijing
sale_date=201312/region=shenzhen
sale_date=201312/region=xian
sale_date=2014/region=shenzhen

OK